Time for some real talk. I'm genuinely losing my faith, and it doesn't bother me. Like, what bothers me now is nothing. I am so happy now, so at peace with the world. It's crazy. This is a soapbox moment so here I go. . . How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all 'coz they don't believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet-they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it's not for me. I am not in any more. I want genuine truth. Not the 'I just believe it' kind of truth… Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of God. Got so much more to say, but for me, I'm keeping it real. Unfollow if you want, I've never been about living my life for others. All I know is what's true to me right now, and Christianity just seems to me like another religion at this point. –Marty Sampson, Former Hillsong Worship Leader
Over the last several years Christianity has sustained one body blow after another as a number of prominent Evangelical leaders have either abandoned their faith or questioned it to the point of uncertainty.
During the pandemic of 2020-2021 church attendance continued to take a hit, not only because of lockdown, but because during lockdown many people finally pulled the plug and made their drift away from the church complete. The lockdown simply sped up an already fast moving attendance decline. And one of the many reasons for the decline is that Christian people have been tripping over tough faith questions.
Theresa MacBain, 44, was raised a conservative Southern Baptist. Her dad was a pastor and she felt the call of God when she was 6. She had questions, of course, about conflicts in the Bible, for example, or the role of women. She says she sometimes felt she was serving a taskmaster of a God, whose standards she never quite met.
For years, MacBain set her concerns aside. But when she became a United Methodist pastor nine years ago, she started asking sharper questions. She thought they'd make her faith stronger. "In reality," she says, "as I worked through them, I found that religion had so many holes in it, that I just progressed through stages where I couldn't believe it."
The questions haunted her: Is Jesus the only way to God? Would a loving God torment people for eternity? Is there any evidence of God at all? And one day, she crossed a line. "I just kind of realized — I mean just a eureka moment, not an epiphany, a eureka moment — I'm an atheist," she says. "I don't believe. And in the moment that I uttered that word, I stumbled and choked on that word — atheist.
As I read these heart-wrenching stories of the loss of faith—and those who have lost their faith will tell you it’s heart-wrenching—I’ve noticed several themes coming up over and over again.
The big questions:
· How can a loving God allow suffering?
· How can a loving God send people to hell?
· What about all of these other religions that believe they are the one truth path to God?
· Why is God so angry at us?
The challenge science poses to Christianity:
· Evolution disproves the Creation story
· Science disproves miracles
The challenge of a messy Church that:
· Doesn’t allow for doubt
· Comes across as judgmental and mean spirited
· Is too tied to a political party
· Is full of hypocrites
Another theme is the common form of Christianity most of these people have experienced, a form that included Purity Culture, Fundamentals of the faith, an obsession with the End Times, copious altar calls, an angry God, and certainty over doubt.
I was born and raised in the church. I started my journey in a small Lutheran Church in the Minneapolis area. When that small church was unable to sustain a youth program we headed off to the Evangelical Free Church. I attended a Covenant High school. I dated and married a Presbyterian girl. I attended a Lutheran Bible School/College; a General Conference Baptist Seminary; and graduated from a Lutheran Seminary (ELCA for those of you who might be interested). I have been an ELCA pastor since 1982. In my spiritual journey I have been fed an interesting diet of conservative evangelicalism and progressive mainline Christianity.
I have been through several periods of doubt in my life. Doubt made me question the assumptions I had about God or the Bible or the assumptions I had been taught.
I’m a big believer in doubt. Doubt is the creative space where the Spirit meets us.
In this series of blog posts I want walk alongside people struggling with faith—people who have abandoned it, are questioning it, or are fully committed to it yet confused. The purpose is not to change anyone’s mind but to offer some options to the wholesale rejection of Christianity.
It pains me to read from some of the quotes above that there was never any space for asking tough faith questions. Or maybe the questions were asked but the answers didn’t contain enough substance to hold the person while in doubt.
I don’t have all the answers. But I’d like to jump into the conversation in part because my heart is with those who doubt and question, and in part because I think God created us to question, doubt, and think about faith! We’ll look at some of these pressing issues and I’ll try to offer a few “What if?” possibilities to mull over.
For example: What if God’s way of revealing who God is to us is to strip away our religion? What if losing my religion is the pathway to faith?
In the next post I want to address our starting point for God because where we begin with God carries through to every other question we ask.
If there are topics or issues you’d like to have included, please email me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org
Until next time…
Tim